Wonderful! - Wonderful 312: Jorts! Jorts!

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Rachel's favorite speech-based museum! Griffin's favorite energy-expending make-believe game! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya The Marsha P. Johnson Institute https://marshap.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a show where we talk about things that are good, that we like, that we're into. And I am sorry, everyone. And I think we both owe all of our listeners a big, big apology. Because we love to celebrate special occasions here on this show. Uh-huh.

And we did completely blow past a very important milestone without any recognition. And that our last episode was episode 311. and that our last episode was episode 311. We had a lot of opportunities to make a lot of really great, really timely, I won't say jokes, but references. We could have done a whole episode

just on 311. Crazy Game of Poker. That's not 311. It's not? It's OAR. Amber is the Color of Your Energy. That is 311. Maybe we couldn't get a whole fucking episode out of this, huh?

I only know two 311 songs and one of them is by OAR. Well, never mind that. I resent my apology. That is not a fertile ground. It would have been a mess is what it would have been. It would have been a disaster. It would have been like that one time we talked about Star Wars for a whole Mabunban live show. And then 311 would have contacted us.

I mean, they did contact us. That's why I have to give this apology. All the members of 311 emailed me separately, which is embarrassing. Like, circle the wagons up a little bit next time, guys. And they were like, hey, just want to let you know, like, love the show, love the episode. Good stuff. Talking about All-Star Game, all that shit.

But, you know know where was the where was the amber and they do that for every podcast once you get to 311 they reach out well we didn't miss it on my bim bam on my bim bam i would bet dollars to donuts that we hit that fucking joke real hard that would have been about eight years ago at this point so it's hard to know anything really is that oh god no it can't have, it can't have been that long, right? I mean, that was more than half the run of my bim bam. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for listening. Do you have any small wonders for me to snack on? Just little ones, little tapas. Just little tapas. What will I say in this moment? Just little tapas. What will I say in this moment? Did we talk about going to the hockey game?

Well, I mean, we don't do anything ever. So if we did something like that, I bet we talked about it. That's probably true. I can start. Okay, please do. Give a shout out. I believe it was recommended. Again, I'm crossing the streams because this may have been actually on Besties

that someone recommended this. Check out The Devil's Plan on Netflix, a show we dipped into once. South Korean competition reality show. Stop me if you've heard this one before. That is a bunch of people who live together in a sort of warehouse where they have to play a series of diabolical games

against one another to try and collect pieces and stave off elimination. And the gimmick here is that all the games they play are extraordinarily complicated. This is a game that really requires you to batten down the hatches and focus really intently in order to keep track of what's going on. Yes. of focus really intently in order to keep track of what's going on yes to it the first one they did was like a match of werewolf only way more complicated uh the one we watched last night they had to play a board game but everybody got to make up their own secret rule to the board game using a like series of strict syntactical uh rules that have been placed upon them by the host,

who I guess is the devil? I'm not sure, actually, how to think about it. It is so meaty and so gamey and so unapologetically complicated. And it really is a, it really, you cannot be doing anything else. That's also because it is in a language that I do not speak.

And so if I look at my phone for a minute and look back up, I could have missed an entire like rule of 50 rules about the games that they play. I love that shit. I know that it is sometimes a big, a big bite for you. Yeah. It just requires a lot of concentration, which is not too bad for me. But I do this trick with my brain where I'm like,

how important is it that I remember everything that is being said? And when I kind of relaxed with that one and was like, okay, you know what? I'm going to miss some things.

That's fine. I will say for the game that we did, like they kind of do explain it as they go. You just kind of have to take it on credit that it's not just going to be complete nonsensical uh like garbage this is the episode we watched last night i was wrapped with attention um so that's devil's plan on netflix yet again another kick-ass uh south korean reality competition show uh was that long enough for you it was it was i'm gonna say lollipops that come with their own containers lollipops that come i don't know what you're talking like a push pop okay or like you know

those little like almost battery powered ones now like where it either rotates oh yes okay i do or you push a button and it pops open like the spider-man one we have that's great we have a batman one of them too and it's really great. We also have a ring pop that comes with this little case on top, which I appreciate. That's cool. I actually like that because you could have a little bit of that, pop the case back on, get back to your business at the Met Gala that you're attending. Yeah.

I mean, this is really important, right? Because I don't think any child has ever finished a lollipop. No. Although I will say now a little son has started just biting right into him. So that helps things. It's efficient the way he eats a lollipop. Yeah. It's wrong, but it's fast.

But like inevitably the child will want to set this down. And most of the time that is just directly on a surface. But when it comes with its own container it's like you can holster it yeah you know that's true and that's that's great for me a lolly hole lolly holster lolly holster you go first this week okay i want to talk about a thing that we may have mentioned in passing but we didn't do a whole segment on and that is planet word planet word yeah that's a cool one. I think it's like one of my favorite museums easily here in DC.

Like top three. Yeah, it's a really interesting one. DC obviously has a shit ton of museums that are chock-a-block full of stuff and exhibits that are very, very dense and you can spend a lot of time in. and exhibits that are like very very like dense and you can spend a lot of time in i like how planet word is just like here's like a dozen very very tight very very cool very interactive sort of experiences yeah exactly it's designed to be um really technology heavy in a way that is supposed to engage you kind of for minute one yeah uh and And I did. That's just so refreshing. Yeah. Like I have always loved a museum, but I recognize it's a hard sell for a lot of people, because it's just walking around and looking at things most of the time. And if you are not particularly competent

in the area of the media you're looking at, a lot of times you can just kind of be like, I'm not connecting with anything here. Yeah, yeah right but this one is really designed to like hook you yeah uh and it's it's really really new actually too which i didn't realize it it opened only a couple years before we moved here um but it is it's in a building downtown it's not a smithsonian uh it's located inside the former Franklin School, which is a historic landmark on 13th and K Streets. It's like over 150 years old. They had to totally restore it over a period of two years to make it even. Big shout out, we should say.

Last time we did visit with the whole family, a couple of folks who worked there took us on a little tour of some of the spots, which was really, really neat. Because it is cool to see that building that I've been to a few times now from a different sort of perspective. Yeah, one of the things they mentioned on that tour and I found when I was researching it is that it is the site of both one of the city's first public schools and the world's first wireless voice transmission achieved by Alexander Graham Bell in 1880. Yeah, cool. He's like in that building what an appropriate like building to have a museum dedicated to words in it so kind of the brains behind it is ann friedman uh she is a retired school teacher uh and when she retired she had this idea that she wanted to do something about literacy and reading and originally she was thinking about like some kind of children's program uh and then she

had this idea after doing some research and finding out about the national museum of mathematics in new york which was using technology for the purpose of making math engaging. Okay. That seems like a way harder sell than it was. I know. I know. And she was intimidated, of course, because not only did she have no experience in creating museums, she's also not a linguist. So she gathered like a real strong team of knowledgeable people together and traveled all over and looked at museums and kind of came up with this idea to bring technology kind of to the forefront of it. So this is a interview she did

with the Washington Post. And she said, she thought technology was key because it would, quote, suck people in by being really different and cool. So you would start doing things with words and language sort of in spite of yourself, whether or not you considered yourself a reader or someone who knew anything about words. And I had in my head one example of that. And that was that I had never used a teleprompter. And I thought, okay, so if you get kids to give a speech, they'd be reading, but because they got to try teleprompter, right? This idea that like, I mean, you're making it really attractive in a way that like people can just walk up and participate right um i want to say tricking uh because that's the way it feels

with big son big son can sense education and and enrichment like from a mile away. Yeah. So you have to like meet him where he is, which most of the time is technology. Yeah. So this place is super, super cool. I mean, it starts from like minute one. You're outside the museum and they have that, what they call the speaking willow, which is a metal sculpture resembling a weeping willow. And it plays voice recordings from hundreds of different languages. And these like little bell shaped like tubes that hang down from it so you can only hear the voices as you are standing immediately underneath yeah so it's this weird effect where it's not like

you're hearing this cacophony of lots of voices it's like as you move around you sort of step into the cone of like a specific sort of voice it is a trip and it is very very it is very easy to not realize that it does anything like you will walk over and then you will step under it to get a closer look and all of a sudden you will hear people talking there are 364 individual speakers cool in that in that tree and then inside there's just a bunch of different things. The karaoke room, super popular. Yeah. Because it is just karaoke. Except that it also, before you pick a song off a list of like a dozen popular songs,

before you get into it, it tells you about the mechanics of the songwriting process. So like, this is this rhyme, and this is the meter that they use here. And pay attention, actually, how the meterwriting process. So like this is this rhyme and this is the meter that they use here. And pay attention actually how the meter repeats here. And that's what makes for such a strong pop hook. And then you get to sing Taylor Swift. It's like fucking brilliant. Yeah, each song has an introduction

that tells you what to look for and what the rhyming techniques are. So fucking cool. And you're reading. I mean, that's the thing. It's another example of where they take something that is not intimidating and they just allow you to practice a skill as a as a kid that is is really awesome um my favorite thing is the large computer screen where you can use brushes labeled with words such as crepuscular or autumnal

and it changes the picture on the screen to reflect those words. Yeah, so it's like a projection around the entire room of like a pastoral sort of landscape. And then as you dip your paintbrush in these adjectives, it changes the like light projection. It is really very, very cool. That is the room, though, that I feel like everybody wants to like get into. So whenever we bring the boys in there, we have to sort of wait our turn before they can. And they only have like two paintbrushes or three paintbrushes.

So, I mean, and that's designed intentionally, right? Because it's not a huge room. No. Everybody's up there with a paintbrush. It's very cool, though. You're not getting anything out of it. One room we haven't really. I mean, you got to talk about the word wall, right?

Oh, well, yeah. And then the word wall right oh well yeah and then the word wall there's a giant wall of words that are just big white block letters and then when the like show starts the room goes dark and then this like projection mapped light display appears that will illuminate the words yeah and teach you about like the origins of these words so it's like this basically whole third of language comes from yeah these two source countries but these are portmanteaus and these evolved from like teen girls uh speaking and this one came from australia it is so so cool it's called it's an

exhibit called where do words come from and it's a 22 foot tall talking word wall uh with microphones with microphones yeah can interact so they they will give you for example they'll highlight a 22-foot tall talking word wall. With microphones. With microphones. Yeah, it can interact. So they will give you, for example, they'll highlight a few words and be like, which one of these do you want to talk about? And if you're Justin McElroy, you'll yell jorts really loud. Yeah, over and over and over again. Jorts, jorts, jorts, jorts.

Sometimes the words react when you yell them. So there's like a segment on onomatopoeia. And so if you go like buzz, then the word buzz will start to like vibrate and glow yellow. But it's just like, it's just lights flashing on on the word. It is very, it's it is very, very cool. It's one of my favorite, like museum exhibits like ever, I think. So the exhibit I was going to talk about is Lexicon Lane. This is like a kind of a little roped off area. We wandered in there once. Oh, yeah. But we were not prepared at all for what was in the room. And so we just kind of left. Left, yeah.

You report to the reception desk and you are given a case to solve. There are 26 cases with five to eight puzzles in each one. And you are advised to reserve a particular story before you attend. And it's basically a room with a bunch of display cases. They did a contract with Lone Shark Games, which is a game and puzzle design studio in Seattle. Have you heard of Lone Shark? No, I don't think so. But the idea is that you and your family walk around these little glass display cases and you can solve language language based puzzles together. Yeah. All of this is recent, as I mentioned, it was supposed to open

to the public in May 2020. I wonder why it didn't do that. We also should mention, I would say the big set piece of the museum is a big library with these rows of desks with reading lights. And you can grab certain books from the library and open them up underneath the reading light. And then the reading light is a projector that changes and displays like interviews about the writing of the book and like looks like the pictures are moving on the book. Yeah. That is... And the secret poetry room, of course.

And there's a secret poetry room in there. It is the coolest fucking place. I love that museum so much. So anyway, so it was supposed to open May 2020. It officially opened October 2020 and then was shut down again. Oh, no. And then opened permanently in April 2021. And it's incredible.

It's like it's totally one of a kind. It's so inviting. Apparently, that little gift shop was designed by Nate Berkus. It's just everything is very thoughtfully done. It's very interactive. in dc that feel very i don't know thrown together or kind of cash inny or like they feel like pop-up sort of experience or they've been the same museum for the past 50 years i mean that's also fine yeah this one this is a this one really is one of a kind in like idea execution and like value that it provides to the community yeah it's it's firing on all well and i want to talk about it too because a lot of people that come to dc they feel like okay i'm going to go to the national mall i'm going to go to the portrait gallery you know like you should do that stuff because that stuff is also very good but this is one that you um may not have heard about that i really recommend you gotta get to playing the word um can i steal your way yes sound heap with john luke roberts is a real podcast made up of fake podcasts like if you

had a cupboard in your lower back what would you keep in it so i'm gonna say mugs a little yogurt and a spoon a small handkerchief that was given to me by my grandmother on her deathbed. Maybe some spare honey? I'd keep batteries in it. I'd pretend to be a toy. If I had a cupboard in my lower back, I'd probably fill it with spines. If you had a cupboard in your lower back, what would you keep in it doesn't exist. We made it up for Sound Heap with John Luke Roberts,

an award-winning comedy podcast from Maximum Fun made up of hundreds of stupid podcasts. Listen and subscribe to Sound Heap with John Luke Roberts now. Oh, darling, why won't you accept my love? My dear, even though you are a duke, I could never love you. You, you borrowed a book from me and never returned it. Save yourself from this terrible fate by listening to Reading Glasses. We'll help you get those borrowed books back and solve all your other reader problems.

Reading Glasses, every Thursday on Maximum Fun. Hey, Rachel, guess what? The floor is lava. The floor is lava. A fun little inside joke for just me and my wife, I guess, as our small son has taken to just like apropos of nothing, just be like, Mommy, Daddy, guess what? The floor is lava. Even when we're all sitting sitting on a cat like nobody will be standing on the floor and he will still hit us sometimes they'll say the floor is milk uh it's it's all from he watches a lot of ryan's world videos and in the early days they used to go to playgrounds and

hit each other with a guess what the floor is lava yeah Yeah. And he never says guess what for any other reason. So we always know exactly what's coming. It's really quite charming, actually. I would say as a parent, there are a few arrows in our quiver that is sort of more reliable than the floor is lava. If your kids have too much energy and you don't have a plan for how to exercise that energy, it is a light lift to move some shit around a room and then see if they can jump across it. That is a truth that has been true for almost a century now. Yeah, like we obviously take advantage of like bubbles and balloons and dance parties. But the great thing about Flores Lava is that you can change that course all the time.

Yeah, all the time. Customize it. Perfect it. Our obstacle course building skills are beyond measure at this point. I can't even imagine what it's like because we had done this when we have had guests multiple times. And you and I were like a circus crew and that we're just like, all right, this one's going to go there and then we're going to put that there. And we can like build it in like two minutes. And I imagine our guests are always very confused uh on kids like youtube

every third video is some sort of like interactive dance video or some sort of challenge like that there's there's a lot of stuff by a band called the kaboomers who do a lot of these sorts of like interactive songs which is like you know the identikit for this for the floor is lava, you have to do some sort of silly dance or some sort of movement. And then the floor is lava, get up off the floor. They have a ton of songs. They're like the name in the game for this type of activity. I know there are parents listening that are freaking out right now. There's obviously a few variations of the floor is lava, one that is more sort of obstacle coursey, like get across the room.

And then there is the more tame sort of call and response. Like you better find some way to get up off the floor very quick. Both are fine for our purposes as parents, but especially since COVID hit, like we have gotten really invested in like the acquisition of obstacle piece parts that are perfect for this we have what like maybe 10 of these fairly large foam blocks of different shapes there's like wedges and little stairs and yeah they come with this kind of vinyl exterior which make them really easy to wipe down and kind of last forever yeah uh and you'll see a lot of parents getting rid of them because they take up a lot of space.

Yeah. So I have picked up a few just through like various groups. The secret is to time your kids out so that right as one becomes old enough to not want the blocks anymore, get in there with another one. Start the clock all over again. We also have these like little plastic river stone things that are like designed for this type of activity. They're like built for, you know, enhancing balance and coordination and stuff like that. And I genuinely do take a great deal of creative satisfaction in putting together either obstacle courses or floor is lava sort of tracks. I think that the psychological impact of The Floor is Lava is wonderful.

I think if the game was just don't touch the floor, it wouldn't be any fun at all because it's the imagined danger of lava that makes staying on the shit so much more intense. The existence of lava forces you to sort of take the game very seriously, which is amazing. of lava forces you to sort of like take the game very seriously, which is amazing. I think that whole vibe was captured very well in the Floor is Lava game show that ran for a few seasons on Netflix, where people had to jump across these very lavish set pieces, these very exorbitantly expensive, I imagine, set pieces while trying not to fall into glowing orange goo. There was a great mythology to that show, which was that if you fall into the orange goo, you are dead. And they do not talk about you again.

And your fellow teammates and the hosts like gently mourn you because you're done. Like you don't come back. You are goo now. You are part of the lava. Big shout out, by the way, to the podcast that uh our business manager amanda co-host which is called all's fair in lava and floor that's so good the world's

premier floor is lava fan cast so the origins of floor is lava is kind of hard to track as are the origins of a lot of folk games which i've sort of talked about on on this show before um but i read a really interesting paper from the Social Sciences Research Network, which was titled On the Architecture of the Folk Game, The Case of the Floor is Lava, which was written by Tim Huang. In this sort of research article, he suggests that you can't track when did people start jumping across of obstacles, right? Like that's wild. But that there is a sort of specific identifiable fuel for the origins of Flora's Lava, which was the introduction and popularization of the family room in like your home, which, you know, happened in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, spaces in the house

were very much separated off. Like this is where the adults chill and this is the kids' zone. This is like your formal living room and your formal dining room. But as houses got sort of larger over time. And people got TVs. People got TVs.

But in the sort of like post-war world, houses were getting larger. And so now all of a sudden there was space, whether it was a finished basement or something like that. And those spaces sort of organically just became communal spaces for people in the family of all ages to share with each other. That was a surprisingly novel concept at the time. novel concept at the time um what what happened with the floor is lava is that it's sort of a it's a creation in reverse situation where he posits that the game and a lot of like creative works actually are the uh are the result are a product of the spaces that they inhabit right so the floor is lava it requires a space with a lot of props, which are relatively evenly dispersed in a space

where kids are allowed to play, right? All three of those things became true with the arrival of the family room, this communal space with lots of furniture in it that you could move around. Well, and also I imagine stricter child labor laws like, you can't send your child to a factory anymore. Yeah. I don't know how big a factor that is. If in the 1950s, we're like, well, you can't, you don't work at the mill anymore. We got to find some way to get your energy out.

We have this kick-ass new room where we all are allowed to hang out. If you want to jump from table to ottoman, I want to read an excerpt from the article to close out. Because I found this truly i love this shit i love like folk games i wrote a whole feature article about them sort of for for polygon it's like one of the first things i wrote and i became like really fascinated in it um so in this article uh tim huang writes uh the resulting social and physical space of the family room is one in which the game of the floor is lava seems particularly latent uh seen from this Isn't that interesting? Yeah. surrounding environment immediately outside the home, large numbers of children had access to a common fertile location in which to discover the game. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah. The idea that it's not like one person one day was just like, all right, guys, got this great idea. You move that chair there. You move that table there. We're gonna go across them and call it the floor is lava. But rather as this new space, this new room became sort of standardized across the country, the idea of jumping across shit in your family room was already sort of there and was discovered because there was a space uh invention i forget the term for it but like when multiple people think of the same thing at the same time you hear that you think of like it's

that's magic or whatever but the idea is that like spaces result in in activities or work or whatever and i found that idea so now that is interesting to think about like when i was a kid we used to go to like a lot of historical figures like Childhood Home. And one of them, but it doesn't have props for you to jump around on. This was a thing. And also playgrounds and parks are different depending on like where you are. Every playground is different for the most part, except the ones that are like made by the same company. But for the most part, they're all different. But this was a space that all of a sudden like had all the makings of the thing.

All of the ingredients were there. the ingredients were there and once the ingredients were there like of course kids cooked it up because it just makes it just makes sense because they're all the all the time i think that's lovely yeah and i love the floor is lava me too i am not great at the playing of it but in my defense the blocks we have sag greatly beneath my humid adult weight. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Jordan says, my wonderful thing is Pokemon Go. I play it almost every day with my fiance,

and there's nothing better than filling out our Pokedex, comparing what shinies we get, and trading Pokemon with each other, trying to get a lucky trade. It's a great way to stay nerdy and active at the same time with my best friend. We're just now sort of getting back in. Just now getting back in as the weather turns.

Back into Pokemon Go, caught a shiny Lapras on a walk the other day, which I got very excited about and nobody else did. Daniel says, my small wonder is having an array of squeeze bottles for all my fats and oils in the kitchen. You would not believe how fun and easy it makes sauces, whether I'm mixing in a bowl

or just getting an extra drip into the pan not having to deal with a handful of twist on and off lids and having a nice uniform way of housing them in the cabinet.

Yes. We don't have squeeze bottles. We have like little glass dropper bottles. Yeah. And I always feel like I feel like fucking carmy when I get those things.

I know. Just like a little artful drizzle in the pan. Just a little artful drizzle from a little metal nozzle guy on there. Oh, I love that shit. Hey, thanks to Bowen and Augustus for these theme song, Money Won't Pay.

You'll find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to MaximumFun.org for having us on the network. There's a lot of great shows on there for you to check out now. Got some new merch up in the merch store, including a Sometimes It Rains in TravNation t-shirt, which I adore and will be acquiring as quickly as is possible. And there's a bunch of other stuff up on there too. Anything else?

We're kind of rushing. I have a haircut to get to, which I'm fucking so excited for. No, I'm excited for you to go to your haircut. Me too. It's long overdue. You just got a haircut. You look so great. Thank you, honey. So fetching. I can't wait to join you in to your haircut. Me too. It's long overdue. You just got a haircut. You look so great.

Thank you, honey. So fetching. And I can't wait to join you in the short haircut. It's great over here. Yeah. I'll be right there. Wait for me. Working on money. Working on money.

Working on money. Working on money. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.